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Who needs to look at a dishwasher manual? After all, you just put in dishes and soap and press start. At least, that’s all Mike McLoughlin thought there was to his dishwasher.

As Kidspot reports, McLoughlin never looked too deeply into the workings of the dishwasher in his kitchen. When his biggest dishes didn’t seem to fit the bottom rack, he shrugged and did what most of us would do — he washed them by hand (and maybe grumbled a bit).

I moved into this house in 2008. It always annoyed me that the lower level of the dishwasher wasn’t tall enough to fit my biggest dinner plates. Been handwashing them all this time. This week I discovered you can raise the upper shelf and all my plates fit fine. TEN F*****G YEARS

Then, a plumbing problem sent McLoughlin online to make sure that the dishwasher was disconnected properly before beginning the repair. That’s when he discovered he’s been using his dishwasher wrong for years. As he wrote on Twitter:

I moved into this house in 2008. It always annoyed me that the lower level of the dishwasher wasn’t tall enough to fit my biggest dinner plates. Been handwashing them all this time. This week I discovered you can raise the upper shelf and all my plates fit fine. TEN FUCKING YEARS.

McLoughlin might have felt a bit silly about missing this crucial detail about his dishwasher, but added that there was no manual to check when he moved in.

In my defence the dishwasher came with the place and the manual was gone. Googled the manual this week when I ran into an issue with something unrelated and there it was pic.twitter.com/XPUwDCadcc

And, having been biased towards small plates in the last decade — so he wouldn’t have to hand-wash anything — he joked that he’d just exposed a conspiracy between small plate manufacturers and dishwasher companies.

But the best part was that McLoughlin wasn’t alone. His tweet went viral as others chimed in to thank him for letting them know how to make the dishes fit in the dishwasher. Many of those people had been washing their big dishes by hand, too. And a few had even gotten rid of dishes that didn’t fit.

Holy crap! It IS adjustable! Mine had fortunately been left in the upper position for big plates & cookie sheets, but now I can lower for various crockery! Thank you ???????????????????? pic.twitter.com/hpRXEO8FNB

18 YEARS! I’ve had mine 18 years and only just realised! I used to lie the plates down so they would wash! I’m raging and ecstatic all at the same time. Do you have any other helpful hints about how to live life efficiently?!

At one point, so many people had chimed in that McLoughlin tweeted a math-oriented friend’s calculation that if half of the people who liked the tweet had each been saved 10 minutes of unwanted washing per night, the tweet had essentially created, “2,596,975 hours (296.45 years!) of time freed up for people from washing dishes each year.”

McLoughlin now laughs about his new job as a Twitter’s resident “dishwasher expert,” but the thanks he’s received have been sincere. As he told BBC News:

“I’ve just been sent nothing but pictures of people’s dishwashers for the entire weekend, people with thumbs up, standing beside their dishwashers, saying that I’ve changed their lives, that I’ve given them back so much free time in the evenings.”